After receiving several complaints about the spam on Cavechat in the last week, we will be trying out some new anti-spam measures on the forum. I will be activating a feature that will check newly registering users IP addresses against a database of known spammers. Hopefully this will significantly reduce the spam here on the forum. The problem is, this feature could possibly make the forum run slower and could deny membership to some legitimate users.

We will be testing this feature for the next 24 - 48 hours. During that time if you encounter any problems, or if the forum seems unacceptably slow please let me know. You can post here or simply send me a PM or contact any Cavechat moderator. If we experience too many problems we will turn off the feature and continue to look for other ways to reduce spam.

David Grimes wrote:After receiving several complaints about the spam on Cavechat in the last week, we will be trying out some new anti-spam measures on the forum. I will be activating a feature that will check newly registering users IP addresses against a database of known spammers. Hopefully this will significantly reduce the spam here on the forum. The problem is, this feature could possibly make the forum run slower and could deny membership to some legitimate users.

We will be testing this feature for the next 24 - 48 hours. During that time if you encounter any problems, or if the forum seems unacceptably slow please let me know. You can post here or simply send me a PM or contact any Cavechat moderator. If we experience too many problems we will turn off the feature and continue to look for other ways to reduce spam.

Sounds like a great idea David. So far, I've had no slow down problems or problems signing in since you posted your statement above.Could it be that if a Cave Chat user can't sign in, that their IP might be that of the spammer? Just a thought. I know that won't alwaysbe the case.

David Grimes wrote:After receiving several complaints about the spam on Cavechat in the last week, we will be trying out some new anti-spam measures on the forum. I will be activating a feature that will check newly registering users IP addresses against a database of known spammers. Hopefully this will significantly reduce the spam here on the forum. The problem is, this feature could possibly make the forum run slower and could deny membership to some legitimate users.

We will be testing this feature for the next 24 - 48 hours. During that time if you encounter any problems, or if the forum seems unacceptably slow please let me know. You can post here or simply send me a PM or contact any Cavechat moderator. If we experience too many problems we will turn off the feature and continue to look for other ways to reduce spam.

Sounds like a great idea David. So far, I've had no slow down problems or problems signing in since you posted your statement above.Could it be that if a Cave Chat user can't sign in, that their IP might be that of the spammer? Just a thought. I know that won't alwaysbe the case.

Would Project Honeypot be of use? On the UKCaves which has also recently gotten a lot of spam/hack issues the admin set it up to check IP's against that database before registration (and therefore, posting) was allowed so far he said it's blocked over 900 spam accounts from being created and the forum is spamfree.

That forum is a Simple Machines not phpbb so not sure the mod or however he integrated it would work smoothly here, but just a thought =)

The problem with the blacklist method is it blocks allot of legitimate users. Many times the ISP gets blacklisted because spammers use their service then when real user comes along they cannot use the forum. If we only had users from the US it would be easy enough to just blacklist all foreign IP's but Cavechat has members from all over the world who would no longer be able to access the forum. I am looking into a different method currently and it seems to be working since we have not had any new spam registrations since I started testing this method. Unfortunately the spam bots were able to register quite a few accounts on the forum before being noticed so now we have to find them and ban them. I have already deleted over 50 inactive registered spam accounts and there are still more. They are not able to register anymore but they are slowly activating the inactive accounts so they can keep posting their spam.

The solution is as simple as giving each new user who registers a unique question to answer. The human spammers join these forums and note the answers to any special questions when they register then they post their spam and get banned, then they program the spam bots with the answers needed to register. By changing the questions the bots do not receive the same question so registration gets denied. There are mods out there for PHPBB that perform this function but they are out of date and not compatible with the newer forum software so I will have to write the mod myself.

For anyone who was having trouble viewing Cavechat today I apologize for the inconvenience. A anti-spam mod ran a muck and overloaded the server. Cavechat was not hacked it was entirely my fault. Once again sorry for the inconvenience.

No problem, David! What with all the other problems that I had this a.m. I thought maybe it was because of being in Aviary, North Carolina...or was that "in an aviary" in NC? Thanks to John, though, I'm straightened out...possibly.

We appreciate all the hard work - truly. I check and post on Cave Chat frequently, and wasn't quite sure what to do when I couldn't even get a couple of different computers to even find Cave Chat - it was totally blank. Normally, we can post a note, or PM, but when nothing showed up, I sat here scratching my head about how to let anyone know or even ask if there was a problem. Guess I should keep your email handy.....

I have seen a daily spammers lately, morning and now evening. What in the world do these looser get from this? Have you looked at the business that they represent, and contacted them about their resources they use for advertising?